If you went along Budivel’nykiv Boulevard in the center of Mariupol in mid-February, you might not have even noticed it. Rising between a Greek cultural center on the left and a nightclub with a bowling alley on the right, the seven-story office of Kyivstar, a mobile and Internet service provider, stood clad in gray siding, punctuated by a large white and orange Kyivstar logo above the entrance—a typical corporate facade. You certainly wouldn’t call it one of the most important buildings in Southeast Ukraine.
Walking inside and through the office, you would eventually find the “base” station – the central hive of mobile telecommunications connected to 148 base stations. The stations, in turn, transmitted the wireless signals that residents of Mariupol and beyond used to call loved ones, text friends and connect online every day. But that was then, in another world.
“One by one, all these base stations went down,” said Volodymyr Lutchenko, Kievstar’s chief technology officer, speaking by video call from a relatively safe location in western Ukraine. “Firstly, because of the power, then because of the physical damage.”
For weeks, Russian troops have kept Mariupol under siege – cutting off vital supplies of food, water and electricity. Whole neighborhoods have been leveled by Russian shelling and rockets, fires are burning in apartments, bodies of civilians are scattered in the streets. City officials say the death toll in Mariupol stands at 5,000 and 90 percent of buildings have been damaged, although this has not been independently confirmed. Although hundreds of thousands have fled, officials estimate that 170,000 people are still trapped in the city, with no way to tell their loved ones that they are still alive.
Since the start of Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine in late February, the country’s communications systems have been frequent targets of Russian attacks. Vladimir Putin’s troops have bombed TV towers and hit Internet providers with devastating cyberattacks. The attacks cripple people’s ability to communicate with loved ones and find safe locations, but also stop real-time reporting of atrocities happening on the ground. “We have a number of cities that are currently without telecommunications,” SSSCIP, Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency, said on March 29.
Mariupol is one of them. Information cannot enter Mariupol, but it cannot leave either. “We managed to keep the central site safe until the very end,” says Lutchenko. At the start of the war, Ukraine’s telecommunications providers merged their networks — across the country, 250,000 people from competing networks remain connected to Kievstar’s systems, the CTO says. But that too is broken. LifeCell, another telecommunications provider, says its services in Mariupol have been disrupted since February 27. By early March, only the central base station at the Budivel’nykiv Avenue office was online.
Since the Russians had knocked out the power grid, Kievstar staff kept the last base station in Mariupol online manually using a generator. Even with service restored, the connection was weak, Lutchenko says, and people would gravitate to the Kievstar building where the signal was strongest to get online and send messages to loved ones.
Then the office was raided.
